Apparatus and Technique for Auditory Stimulus Sorting
Peter D. Bricker, Sarah C. Johnson, C. F. Mattke · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1968
Techniques that allow subjects to sort stimuli categorically or order them according to some attribute have been widely used with visual stimuli but are generally inapplicable to auitory stimuli. An apparatus is described that allows subjects to control the presentation of up to 30 auditory stimuli and to arrange the control buttons, which also serve as visual symbols for the stimuli, in spatial relationships to each other according to instructions. When the number of stimuli is between 20 and 30, the essential dominance or similarity relations among them may be obtained from a subject in a fraction of the time required for paired comparison presentation. This brevity of task and facility with which subjects can and do recheck their arrangements reduce hazards from shifting criteria and boredom. Techniques for treating data from various tasks performed on the same stimuli are briefly described and illustrated by data from experiments on subjective evaluation of signaling tones. Potential applications to such problems as language acquisition and voice-quality analysis are discussed.